Good movie when you're too tired to think

Rating: 6/10 (26 September 2005)

The Island ***+
Ewan McGregor is one of my definitely favourite actors, and Scarlet Johansen made a nice impact on me in Lost in Translation. They were the biggest reasons for me to see The Island. As a whole The Island is not a bad movie and actually Ewan and Scarlet make quite a nice couple in the movie.
The story of people in white, kept locked in an institution without knowledge of the outside world has been told pretty many times. That is why The Island did not bring anything really new to the movie business. The overall feeling when watching the movie was "this is OK action". There were some scenes that I really liked, like for example the agnates (clones) learning to live in the real world: Jordan 2-Delta (Scarlet) ordering a drink in a bar and Lincoln 6-Echo (Ewan) asking the bartender where Mac (Steve Buscemi) was and for example Jordan and Lincoln learning how to kiss.
I really like action films, but I also like to have at least something new in the storytelling. That is why the chase scenes and cars exploding were not that interesting, and made me wish to press the fast forward button in my remote (but I was in a movie theatre so I could not). The chase scenes were far too extended (could have been cut at least half) and too much of the action rested on big explosions and crashing cars. Nothing new about that, we've all seen that many times.
What I liked were the actors' performances: Ewan and Scarlet made a good job, Steve Buscemi as an alcoholic tech guy was brilliant, and I even liked Sean Bean as the money-and-power-hungry leader of the cloning facility. Even the story was good in its own way. Just that there was too much effort to make the movie look "cool" with big explosions and extended chases - that was something that make me lose interest at times. But if you want to relax your brain for a couple of hours, this is good entertainment. A good "day after" movie when you're too tired to think :)
POSSIBLE SPOILER
This movie raised a moral question though: should the clones have been allowed to continue their lives in the real world? And was it justified to kill the real people and let the clones live even though the original people were only thinking about themselves?
END OF POSSIBLE SPOILER